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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I've gone to ChatGPT multiple times with a specific intent to buy, like "hey I need a thing like X or Y, but with quality Z too" and sometimes it just hallucinates things that appear never to have existed, other times it comes up with real items, but the links it gives me to buy them lead nowhere, so I end up just googling the name of it and buying it that way (examples: computer monitor, power bar, USB charge station, kitchen gadgets, Christmas presents/toys, soldering supplies like tips and flux, 3D printing filaments, etc).

I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.

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> I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table

Man, this thing is going to be so lucrative when they inject ads into it. Imagine how this is going to combine with the parasocial AI boyfriend/girlfriend people, it's going to be worse than hostess clubs. They'll have to invent whole new categories of nonexistant products for the bots to sell.

Romance Scam-as-a-Service. With an aging population, sky's the limit for TMV.

Same experience, I thought using chatGPT to find some fairly specific things to buy would be a slam dunk, but it couldn’t provide links half the time and also failed to hold to criteria like shipping region etc. I would tell it to give direct links and it would mostly just say ”go on Amazon and search for X”.

There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.

I've had much more luck with perplexity. Still not perfect but at least works better.

Why do you still trust the output for any other questions?

Gell-Mann amnesia.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

> I’ve gone to a machine that by its nature hallucinates and it hallucinated a response. Surprised Pikachu face

I have similar experiences. Asked to find and list a bunch of suppliers near a specific city. It started showing me places that were >5 hours away, claiming them to be a "short drive".

If it can't even point you to a real product on an existing website, why do you trust it for any other information..?

Once they start selling things, you’re actually going to trust they suggest the item you’re looking for over the item they get paid for you to buy?

What in the history of Sam Altman has lead you to believe he’ll do the right thing instead of the thing that makes him the most money?

In most of these cases I'm not looking for "the best" or a ranked list. Rather I'm looking for an item to fill a specific need and I can judge within a second of seeing the picture if it does or does not.

I expect some or all of the items I've been shown did exist for sale at some point in the past and information about them was in the training data.

You prefer outdated-by-atleast-a-year data instead of the freshly scraped and ranked Google Search results?

GPT 5 was publicly released in August last year. That data has to be atleast a year old, right?

If I'm comparing Macbook Neo to a Chromebook, it's impossible for the Neo to show up in the training data, and has to use RAG (This is assuming the data is atleast a year old. Seems like OAI isn't doing fresh runs for 5.1, 5.2, etc. but I'm unsure if that's been officially disclosed)

Not everything good or necessary was released in the past two years.

As an example interaction, recently I sent ChatGPT a picture of my soldering station and say I'm having trouble with it being slow to melt and it says "well these are your upgrade options but really all you need is a chunkier tip with more thermal mass, he's a link to a tip set you could try" but then the link is dead and I'm able to google my own similar set and just buy it (it worked great).

Another one was wanting a U-shaped bracket to mount a riser on my desk, and the only ones I could find at the building supply store are L-shaped. I asked Chat about this and it said it's just too niche of an item to be mass produced but suggested I buy from someone doing semi-custom fabrication on etsy. Sure enough... another dead link, but I google it and find the store, and order.

Two cases where I didn't really know what I actually wanted/needed, and Chat successfully filled the gap with information I was able to independently verify afterward, but also Chat missed out on the opportunity to get a referral fee out of my eventual spend.

Same. I've found Meta's latest model to be the best at product discovery. Which makes sense since that's already their business.

Hi Mike, how recently was it you’ve last tried to find products on ChatGPT? We’ve been making many updates recently, so wanted to pinpoint what it might be to improve on things.

Use Deep Research and try to be as specific as you can with the attributes of said product. I’ve had a few successes this way.

Clicking on any picture itself should present an frame on the right with a bunch of options.

It does but then those are dead links.

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